Interior States

by Meghan O'Gieblyn

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  The museum is less than a mile off the exit, on an otherwise empty country road. It’s a low, militant-looking building with the smoke-tinted windows of a corporate office park. Security guards in aviators and khaki uniforms stand outside each of the entrances.

  “I thought this place was supposed to be huge,” Barrett says.

  “Maybe there are more buildings,” I say, gathering my things.

  “What kind of museum has armed security outside?”

  “They’re not armed.”

  “He’s got a gun on his hip.”

  “It’s probably a Taser.”

  “He’s got a Taser and a gun. Look.”

  It’s Saturday morning, and I have Barrett drop me off at the back of the parking lot, mostly because I need a few minutes to mentally prepare myself for the museum. Already there are the bumper stickers (EVEN JESUS HAD A FISH STORY), and the church buses, and the fifteen-passenger converted cargo vans favored by families with more than six children (my folks had one throughout my teen years). Already, there are kids in those T-shirts—the ones emblazoned with familiar logos that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be evangelical knockoffs. (The Hunger Games is actually HUNGER FOR GOD. One girl’s shirt has the Apple logo, but the caption reads iTRUST.)

  Legacy Hall, the museum’s main auditorium, is a sleek windowless room that seats about a thousand. On this day it’s not quite at capacity, but it seems overflowing with humanity. All around me, there are men with fresh crew cuts, women with self-tinting prescription glasses, and teenagers so behind mainstream fashion they could be mistaken for hipsters in their high-waisted jeans and Ukrainian crown braids. When Ken walks up to the podium, there’s no applause or cheering, but the sound of conversations dissolves to whispers. After welcoming the crowd, he says he wants to begin with something that’s kind of difficult to say. It’s difficult to say because America has been the greatest Christian nation on Earth. We have the largest number of churches, Bible colleges, seminaries, and Christian bookshops in the world. “But it’s true that when you look at the structure in America,” he says, “it’s becoming less and less Christian every day. We’ve entered an era of cultural relativism.”

  The first part of his talk is a ballistic CliffsNotes version of a speech I’ve heard pastors give hundreds of times, the gist of which is that the advent of postmodernism in America has destroyed the authority of God’s Word. Ken’s special take on this dilemma is that relativism has gone so far as to infiltrate Christianity itself: just as the secular world has taken liberties with absolute truth, so the church has found creative loopholes within scripture, in order to believe whatever they want to believe.

  Ken looks down and shifts through his notes. “People say to me, ‘Ken, why Noah’s ark?’ Well, the ark continues to capture the imagination of the general public. In fact, the Flood is one of the few historical events that is well known in almost all cultures and religions.” (Much of the Ark Encounter’s publicity materials contain similar references to the “worldwide flood myth.” It’s the kind of strategic faux pluralism commonly used by evangelical organizations in public discourse.) The Ark also happens to be the perfect tool for evangelism. In addition to the story being a literal event that took place here on Earth, Ken says, the Flood was also intended to be a metaphor about salvation. I vaguely recall this interpretation from my Bible college days: John 10 refers to Christ as “the gate” through which we pass to salvation. Noah and his family were saved by walking through the door of the ark. We too can be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.

  Ken shows some video clips that use sweeping CGI shots to give us a better sense of the scope of the ark, then puts up a colorful illustration of the entire park, which looks like nothing so much as a page from Where’s Waldo?—the cartoonish Boschian chaos. The Ark is merely the first stage of the project. Plans have already been made to phase in future attractions, event venues, theaters. There will be a parade of live animals outside the Ark, where an actor playing Noah will lead the menagerie on board while his pagan neighbors heckle and ridicule him. There will also be a Tower of Babel, a Ten Plagues ride, and a re-created Noah’s village that will include “live pagan entertainment.”

  Ken introduces the Ark design team: Pat Marsh, the art director, used to work for Universal Studios, where he designed the Jaws and King Kong attractions. The head illustrator Jon Taylor did projects for Mattel, Fisher-Price, and Milton Bradley. For the most part, this is the same design team that helped develop the Creation Museum. As a way of praising his designers, Ken notes that a number of secular visitors have been disturbed by the quality of the museum. “One of them went home and wrote an article,” he says. “And he said in that article, ‘That place is dangerous. It’s so well done; kids are going to believe it!’ ”

  The auditorium erupts in applause, hooting and hollering more emphatically than they have all morning. I glance around the theater to see if anyone else is baffled by this response. According to Ken’s anecdote, the visitor was making an observation about the design quality—a specious sleekness that might succeed in fooling a child. But judging by the tenor of the cheers (the exasperated eye rolls, the muttered Can you just believe that?), the crowd is applauding the triumph of creation science itself. It’s as if everyone is tacitly agreeing that there’s no distinction between truth and the quality of its presentation.

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  The Lord’s Day vibe at the Creation Museum is remarkably different from the Saturday crowds. When I come back on Sunday, the place is near-empty. Noah’s Café and the ice cream stand closed early in the afternoon, and there are fluffy harp hymns piped into the exhibits, like an apology for the silence. The museum workers are visibly relaxed, joking with one another and eager to talk to guests. And Barrett, bursting with confidence, poster child of the American public schooling system, is wandering up to complete strangers and starting conversations. Every time I leave his side—to go to the restroom, or wander off to the next exhibit—I come back to find him chatting up the staffers. We meet Joyce and Greg, a fifty-something couple wearing the museum uniform of khaki excavator vests and safari hats. They’re originally from Portland, Oregon, but moved out to Kentucky just “to be a part of all this,” including the upcoming Ark Encounter. Years ago, they worked for the Holy Land Experience in Orlando (“before it got bought out by Trinity Broadcasting Network,” Joyce is careful to add) and did some work with Campus Crusade. “We think Ken is just great,” Joyce says. “He’s like a modern-day Josiah, getting people back into the Word.”

  One of the central exhibits of the museum is a series of tableaux about the origins of the world. The much-hyped Garden of Eden turns out to be an explosion of fake greenery that, like most biblical utopias (heaven, the promised land, the millennial Earth), seems suffocating in its unmitigated perfection. The animatronic Adam and Eve are swarmed with friendly animals, while a T. rex looms in the corner, chomping on leaves (since there was no death in the pre-Fall world, it goes without saying that all animals were originally herbivores). Barrett wants to know why, if Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness, the mannequins’ private parts are strategically covered by apple blossoms, and I have to explain that even though the silicone Adam and Eve are sexual innocents, the museum patrons are regular old fallen humans who might be more than a little aroused by extremely lifelike nude animatronics. The exhibits are somewhere in the ballpark of Disney-caliber but betray a campy self-awareness (there are exhibit signs that read, THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH, PLEASE!).

  According to the exhibit, the Fall ushered in not only death and suffering, but such specific phenomena as genetic mutations, excessive cell reproduction rates (leading to cancer), and parasitism. Once sin entered the world, animals began overproducing in order to replace the ones killed off by diseases and predators, and, as a result of this, even horticulture changed. In
the Garden of Eden, plants produced only the amount of food necessitated by animal diets. However, after the Fall, when animals proliferated, God introduced overproduction of plants, resulting in weeds. In fact—this is something I hadn’t heard before—even human intelligence was tainted, over time, by the Fall. Adam and his descendants had a brain capacity that surpassed that of any human living today. This explains how Noah was able to use shipbuilding technology that wasn’t around until centuries after the Flood.

  As I browse the exhibits, it becomes clear that in the decades since I was a kid, creationists have evolved into a more sophisticated species, particularly in their efforts to reconcile scripture with empirical, observable evidence. Their methods are far from scientific, but there’s a willingness to compete with legitimate science that wasn’t present in the past. It’s not so much anti-intellectualism as it is intellectualism conceived on another planet, by scientists stoned on hallucinogens, watching reruns of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Creationists now have their own research institutes and their own peer-reviewed journals that feature articles like “Emergentism and the Rejection of Spirit Entities: A Response to Christian Physicalists.”

  As someone who grew up immersed in creationism, I never thought about whether it was an attractive worldview—it was simply the Truth. Ironically, it was only after I stopped believing in God—for unrelated reasons—that I began to regard creationism as a deeply seductive belief system. After I left the faith, I read Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould, and as I confronted the specter of a universe determined by phenomena as bizarre as virtual particles and Boltzmann brains, I often felt a pang of nostalgia for the elegance of the Genesis narrative. The truth is that even when it’s dressed up in pseudoscientific jargon, creationism’s appeal lies in its delicious simplicity. It presents the kind of tidy framework physicists dream about: a unified theory of everything—and one that hasn’t been revised in six thousand years. By the time I got around to the books of Brian Greene, by contrast, people were already debating whether string theory had been debunked by the Large Hadron Collider.

  Real science is mind-bogglingly complex and beginning to sound more and more like science fiction (multiverses, spiritual machines). The pressing questions about the origins of the universe have moved from the realm of biology (user-friendly, fun) to that of physics (arcane, counterintuitive), and this shift is coinciding—at least in this country—with shortening attention spans, at a time when truth often gets confused with the most pithy sound-bite. Creationism, which (like many forms of alternative facts) relies on oversimplified, passionate appeals to common sense, might actually have an adaptive edge in this climate.

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  One of the museum’s most recent additions, the Lucy exhibit, is designed to provide a creationist perspective on the famous bipedal hominid unearthed in 1974—one of the most definitive pieces of evidence that humans descended from apes. Up on the wall, there’s a large plaque with the title STARTING POINTS SHAPE OUR INTERPRETATION OF THE EVIDENCE. On the other side of the room, under a glass box, there is a reconstructed skin-and-hair model of the creationist version of Lucy. Instead of standing upright, as she’s normally shown, the model is hunched in the classic knuckle-dragging pose and covered in hair. When you step to the side of the box, ghostly blue holographic bones appear beneath her skin, showing how the skeleton that was discovered was incomplete. The point is that researchers use significant “artistic license” to put flesh to the bones of their discoveries.

  I turn back to the exhibit hall to look for Barrett and find him cornered by a tall gangly man in a green T-shirt. The two of them are standing beneath the STARTING POINTS plaque.

  “So you’re operating from the premise that Christianity is a bias,” Barrett says, gesturing to the text above them.

  “I don’t admit that it’s a bias,” the man says. “I said that it’s a starting point. Those are two very different things.” He’s wearing a crew-neck shirt bearing the ill-advised Bob Jones University acronym: BJU. He has deeply bronzed skin and a smile that looks catalog bought. I hang back, pretending to look at the Lucy model, hoping to eavesdrop on their conversation.

  “Well, what’s your definition of a starting point?” Barrett asks.

  “Listen,” the guy says, in a low, but measured tone. “You and I, we both have the same evidence. We live on the same Earth, correct?”

  Barrett seems to pause for a split second, then says, “OK.”

  “But how we interpret that evidence differs based on our worldview.”

  “That’s relativism.”

  The man gives out a low laugh. “No, sir. That is not relativism.”

  “If truth is dependent on—”

  “Listen, listen, listen. You’re confusing my argument.”

  “I don’t think I’m confusing it at all. The Bible is one starting point. Darwin is another.”

  At that moment, something happens that isn’t, I suppose, all that surprising. I forget which side I’m on. “The Bible is from the Creator, though,” I say.

  The man turns around and barely registers my presence before pointing at me. “Bingo.”

  Barrett looks at me like I’ve just shown him a heretofore concealed swastika tattoo.

  “He’s not saying there are no absolutes,” I tell him. “He’s just saying that your interpretation of physical evidence is going to be incorrect if you don’t accept the Bible as the truth.”

  “So your starting point is the Truth,” Barrett says, looking slowly from me to the man, then back again. “You’ve already decided what reality is.”

  “We didn’t decide,” the man says. “God decided. He’s the Creator. He was there, in the beginning. Were you there in the beginning of the world?”

  “No,” Barrett says. He keeps looking at me with the deflated gaze of the betrayed. I turn toward the next exhibit, hoping he’ll follow me, but instead he launches into what I can already tell is a doomed line of argument: questioning the veracity of scripture itself. He points out that the Genesis story was based on Egyptian creation myths.

  The man winces. “Come on, now. You honestly believe that?”

  “It’s not what I believe,” Barrett says. “It’s the truth. Read any historian—”

  “Any secular historian.”

  “These are people who’ve devoted their lives to studying primary sources and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals—”

  “I have my sources too.”

  “—and have advanced degrees and work for research foundations that—”

  “So do my sources.”

  “—are known around the world….”

  The man smiles at me with a kind of long-suffering good humor, as if we’re the only two reasonable people in this conversation. He squeezes Barrett’s shoulder and I realize suddenly in this gesture, in its assured familiarity, that he’s a pastor. He glances at me as he turns to leave. “Try and talk some sense into this guy, will you?”

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  —

  After picking at a Fossil Cake (the museum’s version of funnel cake), Barrett and I find ourselves veering into the lobby theater to see a showing of Global Warming: A Scientific and Biblical Exposé of Climate Change. It appears to be a pretty traditional science documentary, like something that might have been shown on the Discovery Channel circa 1995 (before the slogan changed from “Explore Your World” to “Entertain Your Brain”). Interviews with scientists are spliced with pedestrian footage of flowers blooming, waves crashing on amber sand. The scientists are, at first glance, more credible than I expected them to be. Most have a “Dr.” in front of their name and belong to institutions that, while obscure, sound like more than mere degree mills. One of them, Dr. Roy Spencer, is a former NASA climatologist who claims, “There isn’t anybody I know today that doesn’t agree that we are unusually warm right now.” Just as I�
�m beginning to wonder if perhaps the filmmakers misunderstood the word “exposé,” the shot of Dr. Spencer stalls in a freeze-frame, and the narrator’s ominous voice says, “But that’s where the agreement amongst scientists ends.”

  “That’s right,” whispers one of the women in front of us. Barrett and I are seated behind a row of about a dozen fifty-something women clutching Vera Bradley bags. These women are incredibly vocal throughout the film, offering Pentecostal-like affirmations after every sound-bite.

  The scientists argue that the current warmth has nothing to do with human culpability and take turns providing alternate theories: sunspots, changes in the ocean circulation, and fluctuations in our wind systems might all be culprits for the warmth. “There’s something going on with sunlight that we don’t understand,” says Dr. Spencer.

  Many of the scientists take jabs at An Inconvenient Truth (one refers to it as “Al Gore’s crockumentary,” which receives a gleeful round of applause from the Amen Corner) for its “doomsday scenarios” and its use of “dramatic footage” of glaciers melting and rising sea levels. Climate change, in other words, is mere media hype—a sensational narrative that news networks play up in order to keep eyeballs locked on their product.

  Then the video takes an unexpected turn. There’s footage of Cambodia, South Africa, Albania—canvas tents and dung fires and ectomorphic children with bloated bellies. The narrator informs us that one million Africans die each year because of lack of access to electricity. The reason? Western environmentalists have convinced their governments to prevent the construction of hydroelectric dams. “We’re sacrificing the poor at the altar of radical environmentalism,” says one of the scientists. The film ends with God’s promise to Noah in Genesis 8:22: “While the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”